A toothless court and a Prince among thieves - publishing's mixed week fails to dispel the mists of uncertainty

As Google dodges an antitrust bullet, Cloudflare's CEO envisions a new dawn for content creators.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:10, 04 September 2025

Once again, the headlong charge of technology has left the law wheezing in pursuit. Google has escaped largely unscathed from the first of its monopoly trials - the one over Search - despite being adjudged to have illegally maintained a monopoly by engaging in exclusive distribution deals with hardware manufacturers.

The details of the ruling are well covered elsewhere but a TL;DR illustration comes in Alphabet shares rising nearly 10% on the ruling's publication, which probably tells you as much as you need to know.

To his credit, US District Judge Amit Mehta explained that his remedy ruling this week was tempered by the sheer levels of change in the online world since the case was first filed by the US Department of Justice in 2020, and even since his guilty ruling in the case a year ago.

"Unlike the typical case where the court's job is to resolve a dispute based on historic facts, here the court is asked to gaze into a crystal ball and look to the future," Mehta wrote. "Not exactly a judge’s forte."

He was of course referring to the rise of AI, and the change in search behaviour it has brought. Companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity are presenting such a commercial threat to Google that is has effectively altered the course of the case, according to Mehta.

Ultimately all we in publishing are concerned with is what it means for publishers and the publishing industry, for which we can safely conclude is little or nothing. We're sailing in the same choppy waters as we were before this week's courtroom non-event.

So what of our own future? It seems to me that the very same competition cited in Mehta's ruling will ultimately put those who produce original content - which AI companies crave to hold a competitive advantage over the others - into a much more powerful commercial position.

A Prince among thieves

After writing in August about how the concept of a content marketplace is being made real, another piece of that publishing fightback jigsaw seems to be emerging. 

In an interview with writer Fred Vogelstein, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has expanded on how his company plans to provide publishers with the thing they most need right now - a secure door to protect them from unwanted crawling. We're written about Prince previously, and in the interview with Vogelstein he is more explicit about his views and what Cloudflare is planning to do about it.

He raises the prospect of Google's crawlers being blocked by publishers in the near future, such is the lack of commercial benefit from the relationship, an idea which would have been inconceivable only a few short years back. He also states the clear truth that unless Google is forced to pay for content, or even better, finally sees the advantage in doing so, then no one else will.

To me the most telling single quote from Prince summarises his thinking:

"The super nihilistic outcome is that you, and all the other journalists, and all the other researchers, and all the other academics starve to death and die because there’s no business model anymore. The AI companies are going to take your stuff and create derivatives. Ninety nine percent of the world is going to read the derivative. No one’s going to go back to the original source. And the whole industry is going to collapse.

"I actually think that’s pretty unlikely. I think we as a species are pretty creative. There’s value in human creation. There’s still value in journalists. Robots aren’t going to replace the world for a long, long time. 

"So then there’s Black Mirror version. Journalists will still eat, so will academics. But we’re not going to go back to the media of the 1900s. We’re going to go back to the media of the 1400s – the Medicis. Five big families. In that outcome, the five big AI companies are going to vertically employ all of the journalists, researchers, and academics in their own world. 

"That’s a pretty scary outcome though, because now we’ve got knowledge that’s going back to silos. That’s the opposite of what the internet did. 

"Then there’s the third option, which I think is the most attractive one. That’s where we accept the fact that the AI companies are effectively in a business that’s most similar to Netflix - where most of the technology is commoditized."

Is it really that simple? It surely is. Mehta's crystal ball might be cloudy but ours is, well, crystal clear. This is the only way the future can work, as, to use a term so beloved of our confused times, it's sustainable. 

But can Cloudflare really build something that prevents content piracy? Again, Prince is refreshingly realistic: "You just have to make it harder and riskier to copy than to purchase. We did it with the music industry a generation ago and there were 300 million kids pirating music. Here it’s only thousands of AI companies. If you make it easy enough for AI companies to pay for content they’re going to get in line and have conversations. And 80 per cent of the AI universe is a Cloudflare customer."

New paymasters

Momentum towards market normalisation is on our side. A recent analysis of ChatGPT sources showed how much it draws upon those publishers that OpenAI has content deals with - it's a lot. Turns out a deal yields better results than burglary. The time has to come of deals for all.

Such a more equitable landscape isn't the whole solution though. 

No one can afford to bet the farm that AI deals will forever fund their future, and given the current over-promise and under-delivery many AI companies, it would be foolish to do so. Some won't be there to pay their bills.

Publishers must capitalise on direct relationships, by rebuilding sales teams to be the power they once were again, for example, and building audience relationships as a first principal of the business.

Yes, inward investment is a must as it allows the flexibility for businesses to pivot when they need to, but our future cannot be wholly in the hands of others again - like it was for so many with Google.